I have figured out the direction of my next redesign of my blog. It came to me immediately reading about a new Micro.blog theme by Matt Langford:
In my opinion, longform content should have higher visibility than microposts. Unfortunately, that content is often lost in the constant stream of thoughts we push out. As a remedy, I’m soon to release a Micro.blog theme that prioritizes longform content without losing your microposts. Hello, Bayou.
I thought I had achieved this– I only include long form posts in my /archive. I organize my posts in a very specific way on the home page: reverse chronological by day, then chronological within a day. This is so that you see the most recent day’s posts first, then are presented them in order. Within a day, the short posts often lead to long post ideas and the long posts often lead to short posts. So reading the day in order feels contextually correct. You can still see all posts right now by going through the pagination on the main page, but that’s way harder and causes old short posts to “disappear” whereas old long posts are easier to find in the Archives.
Except, does this really sufficiently create higher visibility? It does not. The archive is stuffed away and not surfaced and probably not worth visiting for most. Plus, I don’t really want you to go backwards very far on the front page. What I really originally was to paginate on day breaks but thats not really possible with Hugo.
So here’s the new plan. The front page will have just the most recent day’s posts (on the rare day I don’t post, it’ll be yesterday’s posts). Underneath that, I plan to highlight the current month’s macro posts, in a format similar to the month view on the Archive page, along with a link to the archive.
I think I’m also going to move the navigation menu to the bottom of the page, likely below this “month” callout.
I will include the “month” callout on my single pages as well– this way I am pointing toward this month’s writing anywhere you might land on my site.
This has an effect similar to having “featured” or “highlighted” posts, but instead of having a curated list, I’m just emphasizing a recency bias. That’s largely what I want– though not actually ephemeral, my blog is a personal running set of thoughts. The further back you go, the further you get from my current thoughts and current self.
I’m excited about this idea, even if it may take me a few weeks to have the time to implement it. All of this came to me in a flash in seconds after reading Matt’s post. Inspiration can be great.⚡️